Ufo Enthusiasts Say It's Time To Face Facts: We Aren't Alone

Many others have come forward, including at least one mainstream scientist, the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomy professor at Northwestern University. Hynek began as a debunker of UFO sightings. He ended up working out a classification system later used in Steven Spielberg's movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Building on such recognition is a motive force behind National UFO Awareness Week, founded a decade ago by a consortium of alien-interest groups to "promote understanding of this field as a legitimate area of study."

"There is lots of documentation," Kerfoot said, passing chips and soda to guests and thumbing through a two-volume manual of UFO source materials, copies of which were piled high on her dining room table.

"We want to help the public understand. This is a real scientific endeavor, not just the tabloid sensationalism most people think it is."

Kerfoot also, in a way, made a plea for tolerance.

"A lot of us have problems with our place of employment. People have lost their jobs because of this," she said, explaining why Jim, Pat and Holly declined to give last names. Nor, she added, would speakers at weekend events tell all they know. "There can be fairly heavy reaction, from institutions whose auditoriums we use, when we go into too many details," she said.

Much of the talk over the weekend will be about what UFO enthusiasts call "the abduction phenomenon," though, as Pat noted, "some people prefer `encounter,' a word with fewer implications of coercion and victimization."

That, Pat explained, can be "an encounter with a kind of non-human intelligence, where you are taken aboard a craft. Or it can be a face-to-face encounter with another being-and you don't go anywhere."

"We explain that when you have encounters with other life forms, you take a more expanded view of the universe," Kerfoot noted. "The Creator is not restricted to our own neighborhood."